If skeleton classes are not required in Java 2, how does the communication & invocation of remote methods actually take place?

A skeleton is a helper class that is generated for RMI to use. The skeleton understands how to communicate with the stub across the RMI link. The skeleton carries on a conversation with the stub; it reads the parameters for the method call from the link, makes the call to the remote service implementation object, accepts the return value, and then writes the return value back to the stub.

In the Java 2 SDK implementation of RMI, the new wire protocol has made skeleton classes obsolete. RMI uses reflection to make the connection to the remote service object.

On top of TCP/IP, RMI uses a wire level protocol called Java Remote Method Protocol (JRMP). JRMP is a proprietary, stream-based protocol that is only partially specified is now in two versions. The first version was released with the JDK 1.1 version of RMI and required the use of Skeleton classes on the server. The second version was released with the Java 2 SDK. It has been optimized for performance and does not require skeleton classes.

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